As described in my previous article, Birth of a Story Mind, when  people gather in groups, they self-organize into a group mind in which each individual specializes in one of our mental functions, such as becoming the voice of reason for the group, or the skeptic, or the conscience of the group.  These functions are both cognitive and affective, and for the group mind to form, is must have all of those function at work within it.

In a large population of individuals, many group minds will naturally form as the anarchy begins to settle into organization.  When group minds encounter one another as they move through the population, some will collide and shatter, some will maintain their identity but have their course altered by the encounter and focus on other subject matter, and some will combine to form larger group minds in which each smaller group begins to specialize to focus on one of our mental functions.

So, one group will come to express (or represent) the voice of reason within the larger group, while another will express skepticism, and still other will function as the larger group’s conscience.  Just because a whole smaller group begins to focus or center on reason, as an example, does not mean that it stops having its own voice of reason with it, and its own skeptic and conscience.  Rather, these individuals in the smaller group will still function as the voice of reason within the reason group, while another individual will still function as the skeptic in regard to reason.

In essence, one might say that as a small group specializes within a larger group, the members of the smaller group move with it, maintaining their relative positions within the small group as they all be come consistently biased toward the new thrust of their small group within the larger group.  In other words, the individuals take on the flavor of their group as it evolves as a member group of a larger group mind.

This process is not unlike how solar systems form, gathering aggregate from dust to form small particles that combine into larger particles, rocks, boulders, and so on.  It is also not unlike the way the brain works insofar as neurons in the brain (individuals) gather together into ganglia (little neural networks of a few thousand cells), which then gather into clusters and ultimately into the hemispheres of the overall brain

Like in a solar system, loose gas and dust gathers at the center of this evolving organization until the planets, story archetypes or social groups revolve around it.  Eventually, this gravitational center reaches a critical mass and becomes a star, the Main Character for a story, or the identity of a social group.

When people feel they are members of a tribe, not just of their families, or of their state or nation, not just of their county or neighborhood, it is an primary indicator that one or more larger group minds above them has reached a critical mass and is burning with an energy from which they draw.  In our own minds, this is our self awareness, the “I” in “I think, therefore I am.”

In the brain, the creation of such an identity requires a sufficient number of levels in the hierarchy – neural networks within neural networks, sub-minds and proto-minds within larger minds, following the same physical pattern as the story mind psychology, because the psychology is just a dynamic resonance of the underlying structural (physical) system that spawns and maintains it.

The cognitive functions are driven by the binary firing of the neurons.  The affective functions are driven by the flow of neurotransmitters through the fluid-dynamic system of the brain.  Note that neurons don’t just fire when stimulated.  They fire with the electrical potential between the inside and outside of the neuron’s body (the axon) reaches an action potential of a certain differential.

This potential can be created by sufficient direct stimulation through spatial summation (multiple small stimulations all at once) or by temporal summation (a series of small stimulations that collectively increase the charge faster than the neuron can shed the excess through natural half-life style decay).

But this is just half the system – the binary network of neurons within larger networks, which are components within even larger networks.  The other influence is the biochemical dynamic in which neurotransmitters affect the likelihood of firing.

Normally, neurons such as exciters and inhibitors are spewed out by one neuron’s boutons to be received by another neuron’s dedrites which pass the information to the axon which then may fire if it has received enough information either spatially or temporally.

But not all of these exciters and inhibitors actually make it from the boutons to the dendrites for they must cross a biochemical ocean – a small gap between the physical end of one neuron and the beginning of another.  This gap is called a synapse and it holds one of the two keys to self awareness.

As some of these biochemicals drift out of the synapse into the general population of the brain at large, they form currents and eddies and standing waves of varying duration and complexity.  These patterns also hold information, not of the binary cognitive kind, but of the analog affective kind.

When a wave forms at a particular synapse, it is may be more biased toward excitement or inhibition, depending upon its chemical make-up which is in turn determined by the collective impact of sensory stimulation of neurons which had previously fired.

These waves (really just concentration densities of chemicals) are also built from the shedding of potential from neurons that do not fire because they did not reach their action potential threshold.

Functionally, these concentrations can further moderate the effects of spatial and temporal summation so that a neuron which would ordinarily fire due solely to binary network stimulation by not fire because the surrounding biochemical environment lowers the action potential around the axon to the point it is inhibited below the threshold.  Similarly, a neuron which normally would not fire, may do so anyway, because the biochemical environment about it increases the action potential beyond the threshold.

If the point of origin for network stimulation is observation, then the energy produced by the natural decay of neurons which don’t reach threshold is a parallel for internal thought.  Along these lines, chemicals that act to excite can be analogized as our desires, and those that inhibit as our repulsions.

Now this is actually not directly true, for at the level of the whole mind / whole brain, desires and repulsions may be created by either exciting or inhibiting, thereby creating an inequity, which may be positive or negative to the mind at large in an affective sense.  But I used those words to illustrate the fractal similarity of the lower brain function to the higher level psychology, in the first belief that while there are certainly many levels of similar organization in between, the end result is that the lower level functions are fractally layered until they influentially affect larger and larger systems, resulting ultimately in both our cognitive and affective attributes being organized in virtually the same pattern of relationships as the smallest components at the very bottom of the hierarchy.

Now, add this to the solar system model and the fractal psychology model of the organization of group minds and you can begin to get a sense how there is a parallel between a sun beginning to shine, a Main Character representing our own sense of self in a story mind structure, and groups forming and self-organizing into larger groups.

The general population that does not become part of a group is part of the gaseous material that collects in a growing gravitational sense of group identity until it ignites in a sense of self in which, like the biochemistry in the brain, the hierarchical functioning of organizations is moderated to be excited or inhibited by the general population in which they function.

And, as from the smallest interactions of neurons to the largest interactions of our thoughts and feelings, it requires many levels to build a truly functional mind to the point of self-awareness, such as national identity.

Communication among members of the general population is the key to their ability to act as an analog to the biochemical influence in the mind.  Historically, increased communication outside the direct control of the organized neural networks (or socio-political groups) is an essential attribute to the freedom to form complex wave patterns (densities of opinions) which are sufficient to cause a group to act where it would not have by its own internal structure or to not act when it would have.

This is the nature of lobbyists, and of boycotts, and anti-boycotts in which the general unorganized components of society show their support or opposition to what the organization is planning or doing, just as the biochemistry affects the neurons and neural networks.

While communication had previously evolved to the point that many nations were able to achieve national identity, even today some nations have not yet coalesced into the level of self-awareness..

At an international level, everything from the formation of European Union to the Arab Spring illustrate the impact of internet and personal multi-media communication on the formation of identities for nations and even consortiums of nations.

But what of a global identity, a global group mind – the subject of this article?  Clearly, the very same dynamics are at work among nations forming as group minds within a larger global mind – cognitively through channels (network hierarchy) and affectively through the global population (analog to the biochemical) by means of direct global communication among individuals of different nations.

Currently, this process is awaiting the advent of real time language translation that is accurate and effective to the fidelity of resolving idioms of one language into appropriate idioms in other so that the affective content in maintained.

When this happens, communication of analog, emotional information among individuals from all parts of the globe will become a functional dynamic wave-driven system, and with its advent a true global identity will reach critical mass and ignite into what amounts to a planet-encompassing  self-wareness in which the earth itself may ponder, “I think, therefore I am.”

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica

Okay, so this is where I go a little nutso.  Yeah, I know…  But I’m going to be crossing the line that will prevent anyone from every taking my theories seriously again.  Because I can.

Here’s the scoop….

The Grand Unifying Theory of Everything is:

The degree to which something exists is variable, and we perceive this as time.

There.  I said it.  And I believe it with all my heart.  But what the heck does it mean?

It is a recipe for converting space into time and vice versa.  It provides a map of the interface that stands between structure and dynamics, mind and matter, order and chaos, existence and oblivion.  It is Einstein’s equation coupled with the Story Mind.  It is the understanding I have been seeking for more than half a century.  It is the culmination of my life’s work.

Here we go….

Go back to the Greek philosophers.  Is there the prefect form of a things already in our heads, like the shape of a table or the essence of a bed, and we seek to achieve it in the material world, or do we create function in the real world, by building tables and beds, and from this arrive at a conceptual form to enclose a variety of things with similar criteria?  In an overused phrase does form precede function or vice versa?  This is another structural/dynamic paradox, for it depends upon perception: one man’s table is another man’s bed.

As in my last article, “The Interface Solution,” both form and function depend upon context, where one places the line, what one considers inside or outside the group.  In short, we draw a circle around a number of things or attributes of a concept and define all that is inside as being of that nature and all that is outside is not.

Is a bed a mattress, a board, the ground?  Can a table be a bed?  Can a bed be a table?  Of course they can!  It all depends (from one philosophy) on what you use it for, and (from the other) on what you intended it to be.  Both are correct, but not at the same time from the same perspective.

And then there’s the matter of time.  A table may be made of stone or plastic or wood.  Take a wooden table.  One it was a tree.  Some day it will dissolve into its component elements.  When, exactly does it stop being a table?  When you can’t use it as one any more or when you can’t recognize it as one any more?

Nothing exists absolutely.  It only exists to a certain degree.  Similarly, nothing does not exist absolutely.  It always has the potential to become more fully what it has the potential to be.

Hence, the first part of the Grand Unifying Theory, “The degree to which something exists is variable.”

Now, imagine for a moment that time does not exist at all. Rather, there is only an ongoing rearrangement of how firmly anything exists.  Everything has the potential to become anything else or to stop being anything at all.

This smacks of quantum theory which has described quanta as “vibrating packets of probability.”  But as we have seen in my last article, a packet would have to be a closed system and no system is ever truly closed.  Nor is any system ever fully open.  It is all a matter of how we choose to perceive it.

Change, then, from being to not being or vice versa, from falling within a set or outside of it, from being open or closed, is a matter of perception.

Hence, time is not required to exist in the external world.  All that must be is change in the degree to which something exists, which is then interpreted as a pathway that spawns the notion of causality.

Which leads us to the second part of the Grand Unifying Theory, “and we perceive this as time.”

The inference is that there is no time without perception, just as there is no existence.  But perception alone is not sufficient to account for existence, for we must have something to observe in order to contextualize it as this or that, before or after.

The ramifications of this contention are that all we can know is a combination of change and awareness.  We do not exist without the universe and it does not exist without us.

The essence of all this is that it requires both universe and mind, in perpetual equilibrium, ever re-balancing through endless process and endless reconsideration.

Deal with it.

Melanie

Sometimes the solution to a problem comes from a most unexpected source.  Often, there is no relationship between the subject matter of problem and solution, but rather a dynamic resemblance, an analogy of system or operation.

A case in point is when I solved the mystery of the erratic sequential patterns that were created when plotting the order in which acts and scenes progressed through the four items of the quad.

The problem was that while we had it right that all four dramatic items in each quad would show up by the end of a story, when we drew that order on the quad it made one of three patterns: a U or C shape, an N or Z shape, and a hairpin shape.  And what was worse, the sequence could go in either direction along the pattern.

We struggled with this for weeks – trying all kinds of ways to predict which pattern and direction combination would show up and not making any progress at all.

And then, one weekend I took my daughter to L.A.’s Museum of Science and Technology where they had a display of line of twenty-one bar magnets in a row, end to end, each on a spindle on a board.  By turning the first one at just the right speed, you could get it to turn the one next to it, and if you continued this process, with a little practice, you could get all twenty-one moving at the same time.

And then it hit me – the sequences in Dramatica shouldn’t be plotted on the fixed structure.  Rather, the structure was actually mobile – the elements twisting and rotating in response to the tensions of the story.  The pattern was actually linear, but when the quads all wound up like a Rubik’s Cube, that straight line was warped and distorted into the three patterns we had observed.

Ultimately, this lead to the whole set of algorithms that allowed the pressures upon a story structure to determine predictively the order in which elements needed to be explored in order to accurately reflect the tensions involved.  In other words, seeing that simple display of magnets in the children’s area of the museum became a whole new theory of how space and time relate in the mind.

Well, that is also how I came to crack the problem of the Interface Conundrum of Narrative Dynamics.  And here is how it happened, and then its ramifications:

Teresa and I were hiking near our home in the mountains.  She was describing how her father was a strict authoritarian and she wondered if her sister (whom she had not seen in many years) had raised her children the same way or had taken the opposite tack.

We began to speculate as to what it was that determined if a child would act as a parent or do the opposite in all kinds or areas, from child rearing to career choice, to lifestyle.  And then Teresa said that perhaps it had to do with memory – if we hold on to our memories we do the same, if we let them go, we do the opposite.

This didn’t ring completely true to me, so I suggested that even if we let go of our memories consciously, that doesn’t mean we also let them go subconsciously.  So we have four combinations in which one lets go or does not consciously couple with those same two states subconsciously.

As we continued to talk, I began to wonder though, what was the force that would actually propel one to change, especially in a situation where one let go of memory in one realm only to be counterbalanced by holding on to it in the other.

Now it began to really bug me, because this harkened back to that incredibly frustrating question that had bugged me since I was four or five years old (as described in “The Interface Conundrum) in which I wondered if there was nothing, would it be black because there was no light or gray because there was also no dark?

In the decades that followed, this question evolved into wondering what determined the exact moment when a light switch changed from being “off” to “on?”  And, of course, this led to Schrodinger, Zeno, event horizons, the uncertainty principle, and all sorts of binary states.  And here I come up against the damned thing again – my nemesis and old friend.

What was worse, I was hot in the middle of trying to understand the relationship between structure and dynamics in a narrative model of psychology so that I could expand Dramatica into a new analog, passionate, and time-based model.

As documented in The Interface Conundrum, one can think of reality as if it were a field of standing waves on a flat plane, as illustrated simply below:

Structure is like a pane of glass that cuts through the mountains or the troughs horizontally, parallel to the plane, thereby creating slices of each tower or well that appears as a circle.

These circles are the particles we see from a structural perspective in which we seek understanding by looking at the patters of circles.

Dynamics is a vertical slice of the same set of standing waves so that we see the familiar wave forms such as sine waves, sawtooth or square waves of various amplitudes and wave lengths.

The problem is, that to get a complete view of either structure or dynamics, one must move the pane of glass through the standing waves like a scanning line until we have picked up the full width, depth, breadth and shape of each.

The bigger problem is that the universe is not really made of standing waves, but of waves of variable stability and duration, so that between any two moments, some are rising while others are falling, and at different rates.

Therefore, neither structure nor dynamics can see the true nature of reality, and even taken together, they are insufficient to describe this common interface between the two.  Hence, the “interface conundrum.”

In part four of my Narrative Dynamics articles, I outlined this and ended by saying that rather than trying to determine the nature of reality by exploring it through structure and dynamics, the only possible solution that would truly reveal the truth of the matter was to consider the nature and functioning of the interface itself, directly.  An entity from which both structure and dynamics (both space and time) are only byproducts, not building blocks.

And now we come back to my conversation in the woods with Teresa.  I thought about the patterns that became frozen in one’s mind due to the manner in which our parents raise us.  And then I expanded my thoughts to any kind of fixed pattern to which we have become mentally locked.

What is habit, what is selective filter, what truly is the nature and function of the preconscious that have already described in Dramatica theory as the fixed filters of our minds that are built half of instinct and half of experience, but freeze in place so that they mask observation before we perceive it?

A prejudice is like a black hole.  Energy enters but does not emerge, and once it is in place, it never dissolves but only grows to encompass and warp more of what it around it, farther and farther from the center of the original issue.

And yet, in the mind, people do change.  In stories they have leaps of faith.  I actually observed a leap of faith in myself for the first time about six months ago.  I was considering changing my mind on an issue.  But to be sure it was the right choice, I kept looking into that potential new point of view farther and farther to see as many of the likely ramifications as I could before deciding if I would commit to it or not.

And then, I suddenly realized I had leaned so far into examining that new perspective that I had actually adopted it while I wasn’t looking.  I never had the chance to make the choice, yet once I recognized it, I could not return to the old point of view.  In essence, it was like looking over the edge of a cliff to see the rocks below until one has unthinkingly passed the balance point and is now on the bottom with no way to return to the top.

This provided me with a case in point to something I had for some time suspected.  That no binary state can ever change from within – it requires another force from outside the system.  When does the light switch shift from off to on?  When the finger flips it.  What happens at that magic moment when it can be considered on instead of off?  Incidental, it is just a matter of the standard by which one chooses to measure the process.  In other words, there is no “off” or “on” merely the perception of one over the other.

Off and on are binary structural considerations.  The direction of the switch and its speed are dynamic.  The finger is chaos, as far as the closed system of the switch is concerned.  So, how do we determine whether a child will raise their children in the same or a different manner than a parent, if a character will take a leap of faith, if an individual will change, or if the answer is black or gray?

And then it hit me – just like the eureka moment with the magnets so many years ago.  The mind is a closed system like the switch.  It is stuck in one position by experience.  When the force that molded it remains consistent, that pattern freezes in the mind just like that plane of standing waves.  Even when the child grows, they are gradually weaned from that pressure so that the mold remains solid.  This is how it sets.

But if other life experience puts pressure on the closed system of the mind, it is like compressing a gas.  Think of this pressure as emotional tension created by inequities outside the home.  If it increases fast enough, it heats up the mind, just like a gas, thawing the frozen standing waves and softening them, making them pliable again – malleable – perhaps even liquidic at which point one would have no preference, no opinion, no bias in a particular mental realm.

Imagine then that a new interference pattern is created and sustained in such a matter that creates a new plane of standing waves.  These would naturally erode unless, pressure is suddenly removed to the overall mind, in which case, like a gas, the standing waves will freeze in place and remain, like another black hole – another bias – another preconscious filter – another complex motivation – another pattern of behavior.  And its shape and nature channels the forces that flow through the mind, generating both structure and dynamics as a byproduct.

What a simple and elegant solution.  The complex forces the press upon our minds create waves.  If overall pressure upon us decreases quickly, those wave will freeze in whatever pattern the pressures have maintained them.  If pressure is quickly increased, it will melt that motivating, guiding pattern to be moldable again.

Let us carry it to a slightly deeper level of sophistication.  Patterns may be not fully frozen but merely made slow-moving, like molasses, in any degree from wholly fluid to completely stiff.  Or patterns may be stiffened making them more resistant to change, or lock them into full blown high-amplitude fixations, or locking them into calm flat planes of no motivation that cannot be moved through any ordinary forces, placid until outside pressures increase fast enough to melt them.

Just like the magnets that needed to be at just the right speed, any other speed (of increase of decrease of pressure) only gets part of the job done.

Wow.  That’s what I thought, “wow.”  But what I didn’t consider was that while the mind (or a storyform Story Mind, for that matter) is a closed system, in the real world (in both physics and psychology) there is always a larger system in which a closed system exists.

No closed system is ever truly closed or it could never change.   It would establish either a stasis or eventually, if it exists long enough, establish a repetitive cycle, even if it is extremely complex.

This is good, for without influence from outside, there could be no finger to flip the switch and binary states could never change except alternately in cyclic repetition.

But here’s the rub.  The realm outside the closed system is not homogeneous which, if it were, would equally affect the entire interior of the closed system with a consistent pressure increase or decrease from all side equally and simultaneously.

It is because there are many closed systems in physics and many individual minds, that the pressures brought to bear on the standing waves within the system are not equally applied.  Rather, one area of our minds’ standing waves may be softening while other areas are stiffening.  And, in fact, counteractive forces from outside may cancel out each others effects in a single given standing wave area, or mitigate the effect of one or the other.

And so, we do not have just one complex motivational pattern that is freezing or thawing, but a multitude, an infinity, not limited to the number of our brain cells but to the almost limitless analog undulations of the biochemical and emotional systems of our minds, ever in flux, with currents and eddies, like weather patterns of different courses, strengths and durations which wash up against our neurons, easing the firing or inhibiting it as the standing waves rise and fall.

And so, in the end, the interface solution resolves the problem of the paradox of black or gray, because it is structurally black and dynamically gray.  And it solves the problem of a mind that cannot choose between two mutually exclusive but equally valid solutions by invoking the forces from outside the closed frame of reference for the thought problem by realizing that each solution is the only one, depending upon the external context.

While this addition to the theory (to my satisfaction) proves once and for all that there is no true certainty because there is always a higher or smaller closed system, it also provides a model of the nature and function of the interface itself, allowing us, for the first time, to determine exactly the operation and effect of one closed system (which is, in fact, truly open) and its surrounding external environment (which is, in fact, truly closed) upon one another.

In short, it describes how any closed system can be taken in conjunction with its surround open system to create a new closed system, and vice versa into the microcosms within the closed system as well.

And lastly (and I truly hope finally as well), the entire model indicates that none of this means anything without defining if a system is open or closed.  But since each system is both open and closed (depending on context), it is really a mater of perception.  And this infers that both the laws of psychology (and by extension, physics) simply do not exist without the mind, which must contextualize them.

In my usual arrogant audacity, I believe this model, this entire line of inquiry provides the essence of a Unified Field or Grand Unifying Theory of Everything:

The degree to which something exists is variable, and we perceive this as time.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica